I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in.
you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it's considered a "privacy" browser by people who don't know better.
Brave is just too shady
It's amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave's entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.
Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I've screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
I have no idea how they developed such a following. They're shady AF.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don't understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
That is unfortunate, newpipe is awesome, dare I say better than YouTube Premium.
Yeah, I mean Brave seems to give me all the features premium does, at least the ones I want. I have a Google account specifically for YouTube watching with which I’ve trained/brute-force-hidden-trash to the point the algorithm 99% of the time gives me what I’m interested in, so it’s pretty simple to pop open the browser and put something on to listen to on a drive.
Newpipe doesn't use the algorithm (besides the feed for popular but you don't really contribute to it though) which is actually one of the reasons I like it because it allows me to cut down on my watch time (though I also tend to listen much more than watch nowadays).
It does have downloads too, admittedly I never use this feature but it is neat because you can choose the format and quality which goes above even premium's choices for quality.
3rd party solutions for these corporate run apps truly are amazing!
I do download on my desktop with an extension (I think it’s just called “YouTube downloader”) or something.
Downloading videos is a regular habit not just to bypass ads but because the videos can disappear for everything from corporate to personal to esoteric reasons.
I use Revanced, personally, but also have NewPipe installed.
You could check out uYouPlus then, it doesn’t require jailbreaking or anything but instead works through “sideloading”. I’ve used it for years and it’s honestlygreat:
Or they could keep using Brave? I use Brave on my phone and Firefox on my desktop for the same reasons mentioned, but in general Brave is a great browser on phones. I'm amazed it isn't hugely popular if only for the YouTube features.
“No you MUST uninstall Brave, the company is too shady!” -someone using a phone made by a literal advertising company
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It's bad because they did it behind their user's backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they're not telling me about.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products.. :(
It'd be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I'd love an open and private search engine that isn't just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren't just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you're looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn't come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn't seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I'll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I'm having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I don't really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn't seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I'd much prefer to support something independent if I can
Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren't great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people's search results, but instead they're taking other people's web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little... Lacking :(
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
After their crypto crap, this doesn't surprise me one bit.
And don't give me that "You can disable the crypto" the fact is, you shouldn't have to because it shouldn't have ever been included in the first place.
Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
Breaking their users' trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should've been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
i still don't get why there aren't more firefox based browsers, i'm on librewolf, but there aren't as many firefox based alternatives, as there are for chromium. why ?
Ironically, Brave tried to be Firefox based in their early days but they ultimately decided Chromium would meet their needs better so they switched over.
is it their extensions ? why ? i just... i've been searching for hour now, i don't know why...
so, if i'm reading it right, they just kind of got into electron and sticked with it ? i get that mozilla is no saint with firefox, but... i don't know man, i'd've been more likely to try to brave if it was ff based...
Hoping manifest v3 ends up being enough of a problem for adblockers that it pushes them to consider moving to firefox.
I heard chromium is easier to work with than gecko.
I heard the same - over a decade ago.
Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.
I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.
One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
Not supporting is one thing but being so actively against, is interesting
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Lynx FTW
I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.
I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain
Such a noob didn't even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.
Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads.
Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
or just librewolf \ Mull that comes with uBO already installed, if he don't want to let his users (that are probably techie, so idk why) install add-ons by themselves. Otherwise, I can't find a single reason of using brave lol
Brave provides a good balance between features and privacy for normal users.
I think many users will be uncomfortable with Mull and especially Librewolf.
(I personally use Mull but since it's limited in functionality I sometimes have to switch to a more fully featured browser, that browser being Brave.)
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don't exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn't in other browsers?
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.
I'm an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn't a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven't had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I've personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven't gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don't implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections.
Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap.
Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about "Firefox specific bugs" because they haven't implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they've caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there's a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it's version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you're in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it's because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.
Got any alternatives to use?
If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn't make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I'm glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives...
rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context
Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.
It works with Google Cloud's dashboard lol, I swear they broke it in Firefox on purpose.
But seriously it's like the IE days, some sites are designed with one target in mind and that target is now Chrome instead of IE, partly because the Chromium engine is now the de facto one to embed and rebrand. So sometimes you just have to use Chrome.
However I use Firefox 99% of the time myself and only use Chrome when needed (mostly when managing my Google compute engine VMs, sigh)
Google integration. That’s all. Anything else is anecdotal, is ill-informed hubris or is a combination of both.
I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.
Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.
Didn't they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I've never understood the love for that browser.
The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.
The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave's own results, not just resold Bing results; so they're actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.
I know people advertise a lot of good things for Brave. But I've never seen them. It's installed in my system, it's what I spin up to enter shady websites (don't ask), because it works well with ad based hidden link providers. But it's not that performant, vanilla Brave is way slower than riced up Firefox on my system. It shows sponsored ads, it straight tells you that it might collect data, it's bloated with buttons and crypto bullshit. I just don't see what any of the shills are talking about, and it sells your activity on the browser to AI trainers because their search engine is just that, a meta search engine crawler, sorry but it's just like any other browser.
To me Firefox is the best browser.
I use Chrome because I'm lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I'm considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.
I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.
Hey there, I'm here to encourage to move your stuff over to Firefox. If you have your password synched with Chrome's built-in password manager, also take this opportunity to export your passwords to another password manager such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. There are mobile versions available and they also work in apps other than browsers. Looking forward to seeing you on Firefox! :D
Just the Multi-Account containers are worth switching. That thing is a godsend if you need to use multiple accounts for one service. And to have your work stuff separate from your personal stuff. And to avoid tracking across sites.
It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it's the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.
TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they're stealing data and selling it and giving "rights" to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.
And it's not in an "our AI 'read' the page and is making their own", it's straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)
without attribution
no..? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.
Yea within no time Brave will become evil as hell because the CEO is a silicon valley bro. They just waiting for more people to adapt their product and services.
Brave will become evil
The were evil since they started with all the cryptobullshit.
LOL, about half the points in the article are struck through now. Yet another "journalist" who doesn't understand how anything works getting angry how they way they imagine it works.
That's some quality reporting "stackdiary".
Lol, I'm glad he at least included the full email response from them.
You can tell he's a little salty and still misinterpreting things when you read about how he took their response to the Search Crawler part.
I'm too stupid to get any of this so... Can I continue using Brave or should I look for alternatives?
This article shouldn't affect Brave users themselves.
The content of the article deals with issues that only website owners/publishers have to be salty about. Much of what's left comes down to the legal grey area of how to treat LLMs like ChatGPT and whether they're allowed to scrape websites for training data or not.
Every single one of these Brave "scandals" are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn't be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn't even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their "Summarizer" feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don't seem to care anymore because of stupid "Firefox good brave bad" browser wars nonsense.
Microsoft and google like to shit all over Brave all the time. Brave is very privacy friendly, the data they collect from their users is way less invasive than the shit Edge and Chrome collect from you.
I was a big Brave supporter back in 2019-2020 when it seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it. But they squandered any goodwill they had with their crypto add-ons and rewards
I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.
You can turn these off. It's part of their crypto rewards system (you get occasional ads, some crypto and then some of it gets distributed back to the websites you vist most, or just the ones you select) so it's on by default. But you can easily opt out of this from settings.
I don't think this whole crypto system lifted off really, but it was a neat idea to reward web content creators and users, according to traffic and preferences.
That's like the whole point of brave though, you get "paid" (peanuts) for watching the ads
Those ads are the point of their business model. They show you ads, and repay you with tokens. You can gift those tokens to content creators or sell them on the market.
You can disable those, they can be set to some frequency per hour and you get paid brave attention tokens based on that
Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
decided to give the bat thing a go, had to sign up for this crypto thing. that is the only time I've ever been apart of a security breach
I've had nothing but issues, first things were good, then you had to make an Uphold account. Couldn't do that from my country, then account limit issues. You can only link your wallet to 4 devices and if you reset your phone it counted as adding a device.
Locked me out of my wallet after 1 phone upgrade and replacing the cpu on my desktop.
Currently you have to set some sort of account overseer to collect BAT. I still get the ads, but they haven't sent a payout in months.
All in all I estimate about 450-550 BAT I "earned" watching their ads over the last 3 or 4 years was never paid out.
Are there are any mobile browsers that have ad blocking like brave?
Firefox for Android lets you install ublock origin as an extension. I absolutely refuse to use any other mobile browser.
Mull. It's FOSS (Free open source software). It should be on the official f-droid repo but I believe the divestos repo pushes updates faster since they're the devs of the project.
You can use AdGuard on Android to block ads device wide. You can also install uBlock origin in Firefox Mobile.
I'm not sure for iOS
Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser lets you use any Chromium extension, and Firefox Nightly, with some hacks, lets you use any Firefox addon available on the webstore.
mm yes samsung browser & edge definately gonna be way more trustworthy than brave.
Yeah, vivaldi. Vivaldi is pretty neat, it has ad/tracker blocker. It also allows you to create multiple tab groups so your can categorise tabs and they don't get all clutterd. It's also a chromium browser. It doesnt do anything on fingerprinting though, but i don't know if brave does that.
What privacy? You do realize the browser has access to all the data it renders right?
Mostly not sharing with ISPs, and blocking trackers, cookies and some ads natively is nice too.
Right but you also have to trust that the browser doesn't send your info to its mothership. Because unlike cookies, trackers and such, it has access to all your data.
That's pretty dumb. Brave is looking for any and every monetisation opportunity. Can't blame them, with competition having free browsers, but it doesn't exactly make them trustworthy.
Someone please make a fork of Brave without the nonsense?
Why is everyone mixing search engines and browsers here? This is specifically about the search engine and the problems that api of the search engine has with respecting copyright laws. I use their search engine and dont use their browser
Yeah this whole comment thread is not very reassuring about Lemmy and reveals it's just as vulnerable to manipulation. The r/Privacy thread on Reddit was far more honest.
Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don't have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
I never liked Brave. I don't care for the crypto crap they add onto their browser
Librewolf is king, it's baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!
That took a dive as well in the last edition, unless you have systemd running many features like the top menu fails. Revert back to previous edition and your profile is ruined and you need to start from 0. A clever way mozilla has forced users to abandon their settings and be forced to go with their defaults. By the time you figure out what to disable again ... it is bye bye!
All librewolf community are large systemd only distros, it was all OK with them to stick it to non-systemd users. IBM pays good, and money is sweet! FOSS ... my w
I don't think SystemD is bad, it has big advantages over the previous solutions but I do use Alpine quite a bit and SystemD wouldn't make sense for a distro like that so I definitely prefer software that can runn without it too!
... Looks like it's time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.
Just use Firefox? Available on desktop and Android.
I've been using Vivaldi for a while
That's run by a team of ex Opera Browser engineers.
Vivaldi! It's got everything you just described without the crypto bro nonsense.
I've been using waterfox.
Xbrowsersync extension will make it easy to sync bookmarks across multiple browsers on multiple platforms. It's open source and you can self host it if you want. This for me makes it easy to combine Firefox with brave and similar. Only Vivaldi doesn't support it.
Hope this makes your browser switching easier and cross platform choices simpler.
Aw man I just started using Brave on my Android phone and really enjoy using it's AdBlock features and forced dark mode on pages that don't support it yet.
I tried Firefox and they didn't have an option to force dark mode on webpages without me having to turn this in in developer mode which breaks other apps I use.
There's a Dark Reader extension that will do that for you, if you have fdroid I'd also recommend grabbing Fennec instead which deblobs Firefox, changes some bad defaults, and enables about:config
I'm geniunely asking, what are the alternatives that are fast, have builtin sync, and can block ads on android? I've tried firefox, and while it's gotten better on desktop, in my experience it struggles to play youtube videos on mobile, and the ui is basically unusable on a tablet/foldable.
Use Firefox for browsing the interwebs and something like NewPipe app for YouTube?
What issues are you having with tablet?
You could try Firefox Nightly and enable addons if they're are any that could improve things for you.
Since the transition to GeckoView the tablet ui is just scaled up mobile ui, with no tab-bar and no desktop sites by default. For some reason mozilla has marked it as a feature request instead of a bug (which I argue it is, as it used to have those features, as do all of the competing browsers), and successfully have been ignoring for 3 years (here's the discussion on mozilla connect, but there used to be a github issue before that).
As for youtube, I need a browser to use https://chatreplay.stream/ . For everything else of course there are NewPipe, ReVanced, and LibreTube
I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.
i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there's some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
Firefox with uBlock Origin has been working well for me, for ads at least. I haven't looked too much into blocking trackers but I think Firefox has some ability to do that
Yeah it has some and if it doesnt work Extensions can help out. As it uses still the v2 manifest. It is just straight up better to use firefox ( or their "children" like librefox ( a bit hardend firefox browser ). It doesnt depending on chromium, its not a big Corporate that is super greedy.
This is the golden combo in my opinion. uBlock Origin is an excellent adblocker and it works best with Firefox. The built-in privacy features of Firefox are also decent, even when left at the default settings.
uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too.
SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
ah, that would explain it, thanks!
I don't think people use Brave for any crypto stuff all that much. I use it to block ads.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I'm switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Yep, exactly my thought too. I've made too many hops but none of these products truly offer privacy.
I moved from Telegram to Signal for security only to learn more and more about the holes in Signal. At least Proton Mail is fine.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn't work with other browsers unfortunately)
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
Brave is just too shady and I hate that it's considered a "privacy" browser by people who don't know better.
It's amazing how so few people seem to understand that Brave's entire business model is an extortion racket wrapped in a crypto scam.
Of course, both that and the new bullshit described in this article is all just par for the course from the guy who (a) inflicted the abomination that is Javascript upon the world, and (b) got booted from Mozilla for being a bigot.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
I love how you added yellow border for clarity
(I've screenshotted lemmy comments before and it looks utterly confusing without border lol)
I have no idea how they developed such a following. They're shady AF.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don't understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
That is unfortunate, newpipe is awesome, dare I say better than YouTube Premium.
Yeah, I mean Brave seems to give me all the features premium does, at least the ones I want. I have a Google account specifically for YouTube watching with which I’ve trained/brute-force-hidden-trash to the point the algorithm 99% of the time gives me what I’m interested in, so it’s pretty simple to pop open the browser and put something on to listen to on a drive.
Newpipe doesn't use the algorithm (besides the feed for popular but you don't really contribute to it though) which is actually one of the reasons I like it because it allows me to cut down on my watch time (though I also tend to listen much more than watch nowadays).
It does have downloads too, admittedly I never use this feature but it is neat because you can choose the format and quality which goes above even premium's choices for quality.
3rd party solutions for these corporate run apps truly are amazing!
I do download on my desktop with an extension (I think it’s just called “YouTube downloader”) or something.
Downloading videos is a regular habit not just to bypass ads but because the videos can disappear for everything from corporate to personal to esoteric reasons.
I use Revanced, personally, but also have NewPipe installed.
You could check out uYouPlus then, it doesn’t require jailbreaking or anything but instead works through “sideloading”. I’ve used it for years and it’s honestlygreat:
https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus
Or they could keep using Brave? I use Brave on my phone and Firefox on my desktop for the same reasons mentioned, but in general Brave is a great browser on phones. I'm amazed it isn't hugely popular if only for the YouTube features.
“No you MUST uninstall Brave, the company is too shady!” -someone using a phone made by a literal advertising company
I’ll look at it further thanks.
If you’re on apple I’d recommend giving Orion browser a try. It blocks all ads by default, including YouTube. It’s become my default browser on all my devices.
Firefox + Ublock origin will do the same for you on mobile.
Iirc the debian of browsers is iceweasle.
IceWeasel EOL'd 6 years ago
I use Brave occasionally, but Firefox has been my #1 for the past 100 years or so. I stopped using Firefox as my only browser after they overhauled the interface. I really miss classic Firefox with my tabs on bottom, old search engine bar, and endless customizations.
Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
What does his political donations have to do with brave's misconduct here?
I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It's bad because they did it behind their user's backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they're not telling me about.
That’s why i use Firefox.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products.. :(
It'd be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I'd love an open and private search engine that isn't just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren't just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you're looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn't come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn't seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I'll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I'm having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I don't really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn't seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I'd much prefer to support something independent if I can
Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren't great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people's search results, but instead they're taking other people's web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little... Lacking :(
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
After their crypto crap, this doesn't surprise me one bit.
And don't give me that "You can disable the crypto" the fact is, you shouldn't have to because it shouldn't have ever been included in the first place.
Seriously, early on this company literally deployed a mass MITM attack against their entire userbase.
Any company that pulls some shit like that is just going to do it again whenever they think they can get away with it.
Breaking their users' trust by appending attribution tags to their URLs should've been unforgivable but I still see people pushing their browser online
i still don't get why there aren't more firefox based browsers, i'm on librewolf, but there aren't as many firefox based alternatives, as there are for chromium. why ?
Ironically, Brave tried to be Firefox based in their early days but they ultimately decided Chromium would meet their needs better so they switched over.
is it their extensions ? why ? i just... i've been searching for hour now, i don't know why...
They go into detail on their blog: https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/
so, if i'm reading it right, they just kind of got into electron and sticked with it ? i get that mozilla is no saint with firefox, but... i don't know man, i'd've been more likely to try to brave if it was ff based...
Hoping manifest v3 ends up being enough of a problem for adblockers that it pushes them to consider moving to firefox.
I actually use 5 different browsers:
I use and heavily recommend Waterfox. Less bullshit, more privacy.
Than librewolf? how exactly?
I heard chromium is easier to work with than gecko.
I heard the same - over a decade ago.
Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.
I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191006213746/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla/FAQ/Embedding_Gecko
It seems they cancelled support for embedding gecko.
One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
Not supporting is one thing but being so actively against, is interesting
Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.
Lynx FTW
I like to send the HTML, CSS, and JS to my laser printer personally.
I use curl to pull the text in a bsd jail running on a qemu instance running on a qubes vm and then copy it down on engineering paper and reconstruct it in my brain
Such a noob didn't even pipe it through grep to block advertising. Get outta here corporate shill.
Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer
Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn
I hope people finally quit that shit of a browser.
I groaned hearing Louis Rossmann recommending Brave during one of his videos about Youtube ads. Firefox uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock would be a better recommendation.
or just librewolf \ Mull that comes with uBO already installed, if he don't want to let his users (that are probably techie, so idk why) install add-ons by themselves. Otherwise, I can't find a single reason of using brave lol
Brave provides a good balance between features and privacy for normal users.
I think many users will be uncomfortable with Mull and especially Librewolf.
(I personally use Mull but since it's limited in functionality I sometimes have to switch to a more fully featured browser, that browser being Brave.)
Looks neat, but it still depends on Firefox so I don't mind supporting Firefox which is our last bastion against a Chrome monopoly.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don't exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn't in other browsers?
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.
I'm an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn't a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven't had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I've personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven't gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don't implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about "Firefox specific bugs" because they haven't implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they've caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there's a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it's version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you're in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it's because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
I refuse to use Chrome and I use Firefox for work since 99% of my time is on that.
Got any alternatives to use?
If Brave redirecting users to use their affiliate links without consent didn't make people stop using it, I doubt this will.
On Firefox. But I do like Brave Search over something like DDG, their AI summarizer is quite good.
I think Librewolf is a much better option. BUT, I'm glad that at least Brave is taking a stance against Google. (the enemy of my enemy sort of thing). I hope all these firms are sued into following the proper copyright though.
I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives...
rendering engines. I use multiple browsers depending on context
Agreed, like what do chromium based browsers really have over Firefox? Real question.
It works with Google Cloud's dashboard lol, I swear they broke it in Firefox on purpose.
But seriously it's like the IE days, some sites are designed with one target in mind and that target is now Chrome instead of IE, partly because the Chromium engine is now the de facto one to embed and rebrand. So sometimes you just have to use Chrome.
However I use Firefox 99% of the time myself and only use Chrome when needed (mostly when managing my Google compute engine VMs, sigh)
Google integration. That’s all. Anything else is anecdotal, is ill-informed hubris or is a combination of both.
I had to use a chrome based browser on Android for a couple of weeks since Firefox had a problem. It was like a nightmare. It is common in IT history that worse quality product wins.
Think about MS-DOS. Microsoft also sold Xenix,a UNIX system that time.
Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?
I'm assuming it's this article.
If this is accurate that's troubling
Gracias
De nada.
I apologize. I included an image in the submission and it seems it hijacked the URL. I've edited the submission to include the link.
i have that issue too, sometimes. it's either image or link. maybe you are not supposed to use both fields at the same time?
Didn't they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it
They got their start redirecting ads to sponsored ads. I've never understood the love for that browser.
The browser is highly performant, contains (nearly) all necessary (usability and privacy) features and is suitable for beginners.
The search has a nice interface that is usable without javascript, has an onion site and should be low on telemetry. It also (in my opinion) has the best search results after Google. And these search results are Brave's own results, not just resold Bing results; so they're actually bringing real competition to the search engine market.
I know people advertise a lot of good things for Brave. But I've never seen them. It's installed in my system, it's what I spin up to enter shady websites (don't ask), because it works well with ad based hidden link providers. But it's not that performant, vanilla Brave is way slower than riced up Firefox on my system. It shows sponsored ads, it straight tells you that it might collect data, it's bloated with buttons and crypto bullshit. I just don't see what any of the shills are talking about, and it sells your activity on the browser to AI trainers because their search engine is just that, a meta search engine crawler, sorry but it's just like any other browser.
To me Firefox is the best browser.
I use Chrome because I'm lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I'm considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.
I made the move, there are mild inconveniences, but you can export your passwords, bookmarks, et al. from chrome to firefox, you can even set firefox as your primary source for app password suggestions on android. The biggest win is having UBlock Origin on my phone browser.
Hey there, I'm here to encourage to move your stuff over to Firefox. If you have your password synched with Chrome's built-in password manager, also take this opportunity to export your passwords to another password manager such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. There are mobile versions available and they also work in apps other than browsers. Looking forward to seeing you on Firefox! :D
Just the Multi-Account containers are worth switching. That thing is a godsend if you need to use multiple accounts for one service. And to have your work stuff separate from your personal stuff. And to avoid tracking across sites.
It takes a little while to get everything moved over and working the way you want to, but for me it's the superior browser. I get better performance especially on older devices and there are a lot of core things like bookmark handling that are better on Firefox.
TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they're stealing data and selling it and giving "rights" to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.
And it's not in an "our AI 'read' the page and is making their own", it's straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)
no..? on every bit of info theres a source button next to it which links you to the original article, similar to what bing chat does.
brave search, not the browser.
It started with widgets showing crypto currency markets.
I immediately noped the hell off it.
I can't and won't ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.
Yea within no time Brave will become evil as hell because the CEO is a silicon valley bro. They just waiting for more people to adapt their product and services.
The were evil since they started with all the cryptobullshit.
You must be evil to enter the crytoworld
LOL, about half the points in the article are struck through now. Yet another "journalist" who doesn't understand how anything works getting angry how they way they imagine it works.
That's some quality reporting "stackdiary".
Lol, I'm glad he at least included the full email response from them. You can tell he's a little salty and still misinterpreting things when you read about how he took their response to the Search Crawler part.
I'm too stupid to get any of this so... Can I continue using Brave or should I look for alternatives?
This article shouldn't affect Brave users themselves.
The content of the article deals with issues that only website owners/publishers have to be salty about. Much of what's left comes down to the legal grey area of how to treat LLMs like ChatGPT and whether they're allowed to scrape websites for training data or not.
Every single one of these Brave "scandals" are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn't be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn't even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their "Summarizer" feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don't seem to care anymore because of stupid "Firefox good brave bad" browser wars nonsense.
Microsoft and google like to shit all over Brave all the time. Brave is very privacy friendly, the data they collect from their users is way less invasive than the shit Edge and Chrome collect from you.
I was a big Brave supporter back in 2019-2020 when it seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it. But they squandered any goodwill they had with their crypto add-ons and rewards
I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.
You can turn these off. It's part of their crypto rewards system (you get occasional ads, some crypto and then some of it gets distributed back to the websites you vist most, or just the ones you select) so it's on by default. But you can easily opt out of this from settings.
I don't think this whole crypto system lifted off really, but it was a neat idea to reward web content creators and users, according to traffic and preferences.
That's like the whole point of brave though, you get "paid" (peanuts) for watching the ads
Those ads are the point of their business model. They show you ads, and repay you with tokens. You can gift those tokens to content creators or sell them on the market.
You can disable those, they can be set to some frequency per hour and you get paid brave attention tokens based on that
Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.
They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.
I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.
decided to give the bat thing a go, had to sign up for this crypto thing. that is the only time I've ever been apart of a security breach
I've had nothing but issues, first things were good, then you had to make an Uphold account. Couldn't do that from my country, then account limit issues. You can only link your wallet to 4 devices and if you reset your phone it counted as adding a device. Locked me out of my wallet after 1 phone upgrade and replacing the cpu on my desktop.
Currently you have to set some sort of account overseer to collect BAT. I still get the ads, but they haven't sent a payout in months.
All in all I estimate about 450-550 BAT I "earned" watching their ads over the last 3 or 4 years was never paid out.
Are there are any mobile browsers that have ad blocking like brave?
Firefox for Android lets you install ublock origin as an extension. I absolutely refuse to use any other mobile browser.
Firefox Focus as well. Built in ad blocker.
Mull. It's FOSS (Free open source software). It should be on the official f-droid repo but I believe the divestos repo pushes updates faster since they're the devs of the project.
You can use AdGuard on Android to block ads device wide. You can also install uBlock origin in Firefox Mobile.
I'm not sure for iOS
Kiwi Browser and Yandex Browser lets you use any Chromium extension, and Firefox Nightly, with some hacks, lets you use any Firefox addon available on the webstore.
Firefox's stable version also comes with uBlock.
Yes
Firefox has extension support on android
edge has built in adblocker
samsung browser has built in adblocker
not sure about iphone...
mm yes samsung browser & edge definately gonna be way more trustworthy than brave.
Yeah, vivaldi. Vivaldi is pretty neat, it has ad/tracker blocker. It also allows you to create multiple tab groups so your can categorise tabs and they don't get all clutterd. It's also a chromium browser. It doesnt do anything on fingerprinting though, but i don't know if brave does that.
What privacy? You do realize the browser has access to all the data it renders right?
Mostly not sharing with ISPs, and blocking trackers, cookies and some ads natively is nice too.
Right but you also have to trust that the browser doesn't send your info to its mothership. Because unlike cookies, trackers and such, it has access to all your data.
That's pretty dumb. Brave is looking for any and every monetisation opportunity. Can't blame them, with competition having free browsers, but it doesn't exactly make them trustworthy.
Someone please make a fork of Brave without the nonsense?
Why is everyone mixing search engines and browsers here? This is specifically about the search engine and the problems that api of the search engine has with respecting copyright laws. I use their search engine and dont use their browser
Yeah this whole comment thread is not very reassuring about Lemmy and reveals it's just as vulnerable to manipulation. The r/Privacy thread on Reddit was far more honest.
Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don't have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
I never liked Brave. I don't care for the crypto crap they add onto their browser
Firefox forever.
I never really liked brave to begin with, I feel safer implementing my privacy myself, and I think gecko just can do it better.
So few browsers left that support privacy
Damn. Who knew that Brendan Eich was a shady pos.
seem like a good place to shill my blog about switching browser and search engine. I recommend Librewolf on desktop and Mull on android tho. view this privacy comparison
As I user, how does this impact me?
Websites become less profitable and need to show more ads to survive.
Librewolf is king, it's baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!
That took a dive as well in the last edition, unless you have systemd running many features like the top menu fails. Revert back to previous edition and your profile is ruined and you need to start from 0. A clever way mozilla has forced users to abandon their settings and be forced to go with their defaults. By the time you figure out what to disable again ... it is bye bye!
All librewolf community are large systemd only distros, it was all OK with them to stick it to non-systemd users. IBM pays good, and money is sweet! FOSS ... my w
I don't think SystemD is bad, it has big advantages over the previous solutions but I do use Alpine quite a bit and SystemD wouldn't make sense for a distro like that so I definitely prefer software that can runn without it too!
... Looks like it's time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.
Just use Firefox? Available on desktop and Android.
It even has adblock extensions on Android!
Why the hell are you insisting on chromium? It's such a bad idea to throw all our eggs in one basket.
I occasionally use Brave when I need to cast something to my shield. Is this possible with firefox?
Most of the time I use Firefox
Firefox. Not chromium, but everything else is there.
Vivaldi. Browser for a power user. Works amazing. Basically opera before it was bought by the Chinese.
I've been using Vivaldi for a while That's run by a team of ex Opera Browser engineers.
Vivaldi! It's got everything you just described without the crypto bro nonsense.
I've been using waterfox.
Xbrowsersync extension will make it easy to sync bookmarks across multiple browsers on multiple platforms. It's open source and you can self host it if you want. This for me makes it easy to combine Firefox with brave and similar. Only Vivaldi doesn't support it.
Hope this makes your browser switching easier and cross platform choices simpler.
Check out Vivaldi.
Aw man I just started using Brave on my Android phone and really enjoy using it's AdBlock features and forced dark mode on pages that don't support it yet.
I tried Firefox and they didn't have an option to force dark mode on webpages without me having to turn this in in developer mode which breaks other apps I use.
There's a Dark Reader extension that will do that for you, if you have fdroid I'd also recommend grabbing Fennec instead which deblobs Firefox, changes some bad defaults, and enables about:config
Or Mull over fennec...
I'm geniunely asking, what are the alternatives that are fast, have builtin sync, and can block ads on android? I've tried firefox, and while it's gotten better on desktop, in my experience it struggles to play youtube videos on mobile, and the ui is basically unusable on a tablet/foldable.
Use Firefox for browsing the interwebs and something like NewPipe app for YouTube?
What issues are you having with tablet?
You could try Firefox Nightly and enable addons if they're are any that could improve things for you.
Since the transition to GeckoView the tablet ui is just scaled up mobile ui, with no tab-bar and no desktop sites by default. For some reason mozilla has marked it as a feature request instead of a bug (which I argue it is, as it used to have those features, as do all of the competing browsers), and successfully have been ignoring for 3 years (here's the discussion on mozilla connect, but there used to be a github issue before that).
As for youtube, I need a browser to use https://chatreplay.stream/ . For everything else of course there are NewPipe, ReVanced, and LibreTube
happy firefox user for over 5 years now, glad i will never use chromium trash like this
Vivaldi ftw. The only Chromium browser I trust and use.
never used that "Brave" and never will
Switch to librewolf
I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.
i also use brave search a lot, switched after ddg downranked russian search results and the microsoft tracking scandal. but now i am reconsidering. besides searX, what are the best privacy focused search engines atm?
I just recently tried a few different ones because I want to get away from Brave Search. But they either had poor search results or some firm of censoring/altering search results. So I would also love to know if there's some search engine or there that can produce good results without bias i.e. actually just give me the relevant results I am searching for.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
Firefox with uBlock Origin has been working well for me, for ads at least. I haven't looked too much into blocking trackers but I think Firefox has some ability to do that
Yeah it has some and if it doesnt work Extensions can help out. As it uses still the v2 manifest. It is just straight up better to use firefox ( or their "children" like librefox ( a bit hardend firefox browser ). It doesnt depending on chromium, its not a big Corporate that is super greedy.
What about a search engine though?
DuckDuckGo
This is the golden combo in my opinion. uBlock Origin is an excellent adblocker and it works best with Firefox. The built-in privacy features of Firefox are also decent, even when left at the default settings.
uBlock Origin for blocking advertisements everywhere, works with YouTube too. SponsorBlock for automatically skipping parts of YouTube videos with sponsored advertising.
Libre Wolf with uBlock preinstalled could be what you need.
I like Brave. Should I stop? 😋 Guess I should look a Vivaldi again
Nah, keep using it. Brave is really good It can do everything chrome can do, except it doesn't spy on you and it has adblocking built in.
I would use firefox but more and more websites require a specific browser technology or even a specific browser.
It's extremely rare for a site other than Facebook to cause me any trouble with Firefox. It's actually less common than it was a few years ago.
So glad Puffin killed itself... Why does everything good have to go away?